I don't think it's a misclick if you die on a gorgon or goblin because you weren't paying attention. A misclick is more when your level one berserker attacks a level 8 golem that's next to the intended level 2 warlock.

We made an expansion and it is awesome. Really, you should check it out, especially if you're looking for some extra challenge.

I'm all for separating those. I dub the "damned goblin had first strike and I was cleaning popcorn" variety Miscalculation. And I don't mind those. And I dub everything manual dexterity related Misclick, and I want those out, like, a year ago.

Technical difference - if you were armless and using just your voice, and you'd die because of an action that could happen - misscalculation. Slogan: Intentional, but fataly misguided.

Well, technically the latter is your doing, it just wasn't something you intended to do. It's annoying, it can make you angry, but I feel strongly that it's part of the game and it adds to the experience when taken in perspective rather than on its own.

Darvin wrote:Well, technically the latter is your doing, it just wasn't something you intended to do. It's annoying, it can make you angry, but I feel strongly that it's part of the game and it adds to the experience when taken in perspective rather than on its own.

It's only your doing because you can't voice controll what you do. The former makes you angry at your self and is educational, the latter just makes you feel cheated and/or angry at the clumsy user imput scheme which allowed for it.

And "adds to the expirience" also applies to the Unity Bug. Did it make me play the game more than I would've played it? Certanly. Was it fair, sane, indended, usefull or fun? No, it certanly wasn't. Did I learn to think about which popcorn I pick from lethal miscalculations? Yes. Did I learn anything gameplay related from any missclick/crash? No, no I didn't.

So I was chewing on a lot that was said here. Sometimes it takes my brain a while. This is a good and a bad thing. I believe I have partially changed my mind. There should be a warning for death. Always. There should be an option for warning for status ailments.

However, I think there should be a trade off. There should be a badge that is only awarded on zero "mistakes". If you get no warnings you get the badge. A stat would be displayed as well for number of warnings. This way you are rewarded for meticulous play, but not overly punished for sloppy clicking. Yes, yes, I know manual dexterity should not enter into a puzzle game. I agree. However, a lot of puzzle games punish wanton clicking. Usually in a perfection sense(oops you clicked too many times, you only get 4/5 stars). I like those systems.

Of Note this system would trigger ANY time you click on a mob that says death(or optionally a status ailment). If you are winning dungeons in a puzzle game because of lucky dodges it should be noted since solving a puzzle should not rely on luck. Only hinky thing about this is the badge would have to be unavailable if you are in a click-to-select mode, meaning one less badge for other devices and a different codebase potentially. This is not a minor problem I think.

Like every word, agree with possible difficulty of implementation assesment, and as far as platforms go, it could be an awesome "tabletop computer" version thing seeing how the game is allready catering to those who would invest in proper hardware (:P at myself).

It's kinda funny how a lot of you aren't really considering the impact of dying/losing on your enjoyment of playing the game. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say when people are complaining about something this much, but one of the things you learn in game design is that often complaints highlight your most powerful design tools.

Out of the last month or so of logged games, 34.613% have ended through outright player death compared to 30.438% of runs ended with players retiring. That's over 10000 runs in which players died. That's way too high a number, surely! The game is broken!

Well, no, it isn't. 96% of those death runs are immediately followed by another run from the same account. Compare this to the 32% following runs when players retire and 65% following runs that win. That means that death actually engages players more than winning... Wait, what? How does that work?

Dying accomplishes two major things for players: Firstly, it acts as an emphasis point that there's something you need to learn here, something to pay attention to, to figure out - psychological crack, in other words. I can't tell you how many times we've watched brand new players click randomly around the game screen really fast, die, get shocked by that and start another run straight away, click randomly UP TO A POINT and then start paying attention as they notice that things are "kinda similar to when they died last time", that's when you know they're going to keep playing for 2 hours. Dying adds an inflection to the need to learn something, it's not co-incidence that new players tend to die more often.

Secondly, it removes doldrums in gameplay. Think about it, if death warnings were implemented, we'd basically have half as many retiring runs (given the frequency of win vs retire runs right now - actually a bias towards win given that more deaths happen in underpowered runs by their very nature), which would actually carry on quite a bit longer than the death runs (retire runs are over double the length of death runs on average) those "extra" minutes would either end in the success of a win or the slow wind-down of defeat. Those slow wind-downs are huge dampeners on enjoyment of the game, given the follow-on stats. AND winning is less compelling than dying, so both cases are "worse" for player engagement, especially when new players are just starting.

Even this argument is strongly coloured by the learned need to avoid death in DD: Every time one of you anti-death pros sees that "warning" popup, you'd be happy that you avoided death there, reinforced in a good decision by us devs. But every new player would take that completely differently: Having only ever rarely died in the game, they'd get annoyed by the popups and their gameplay engagement would never get the nitro boost of having overcome something hard the same way. Basically, death not only helps teach players to play the game through emphasis, but it also adds to the fiero of winning while removing long stretches of slow-dawning disempowerment.

That doesn't mean that there aren't things that we can do to change perceptions of death, I just wanted you to get a glimpse of what it is that we see when you talk about this. The selection mode is coming, we need it for touch gameplay anyway and it'll help alleviate some of your personal twitch problems (apparently) by moving spellcasting to single button pushes (no need to specify a target if you've already got one selected). Highlighting the current grid element that the cursor is in will also help, just like we had it in the Alpha, because it'll help differentiate for those edge cases when you're not sure exactly where you might be clicking (and haven't noticed the sidebar change) it can also encode other info in the colour of the selection box, so that's a thing too.

But yeah, death is a strong force for GOOD in DD, provably so in fact. While we want everyone to have the best experience possible with the game, some of you need to realise that the power of your reactions to DD come from the whole interaction of the game over time as you've been playing it. I could wish for a system that would up my resource mining rate in SC2 if I wasn't building enough Drones, I mean I'd obviously MEANT to build those harvesters, right? Or I could want a controller with 3 more buttons on it so that I could avoid the dexterity gate of having to move the joystick to do a dragon punch in Street Fighter. And yes, changing that stuff is all well and good, but it results in significantly different games that feel very different to play and thus attract different audiences...

Trust us, we know how changes like this mess with gameplay expectations - that's how DD came into existence after all.

Wow Thank you for the write up. I find the psychology of the game play fascinating. Your statements do ring something interesting to me, this beta forum has turned into in a fairly large echo chamber or at least a feedback loop. We need some new blood to balance out vet perspectives. Have you considered any more expo's and/or free weekends to boost exposure? PAX east is coming up and they love there indies(and I am sure plane rides to the US are in a budget ) Regardless, click to select makes this all largely moot. I think you just have a bunch of people who like to discuss minutia

Lately, most games (mostly f2p) have 30 seconds to catch your attention and give you something positive. If you die on your first try, you leave the game and never play it again.

If you compare that to a game, that costs money (even if it is only 10 euro) you have a longer attentionspan. Your statistics prove that you are right, so we should forget about the whole warning system. But maybe do one thing for me: If you kill the boss, thus finishing the dungeon and then die out of stupidity (like attacking a lvl 1 medusa with 40% health) it should count as victory. Everything else is ok^^

dislekcia wrote:Out of the last month or so of logged games, 34.613% have ended through outright player death compared to 30.438% of runs ended with players retiring. That's over 10000 runs in which players died. That's way too high a number, surely! The game is broken!

Well, no, it isn't. 96% of those death runs are immediately followed by another run from the same account. Compare this to the 32% following runs when players retire and 65% following runs that win. That means that death actually engages players more than winning...

You raise many good points, but I wonder if the data necessarily leads to this particular conclusion. I know that many of my own retirements are not because I'm in a losing situation, but rather simply because I'm done with my DD session and want to log out - which means retiring first, since my OCD won't let abandon the 20 gold or so that my kingdom is entitled to recover from that run. Similarly, logging out after a win is more about being satisfied that I finally achieved the particular goal I had for that session; dying is about being frustrated and starting over from scratch.

There's an important role for each of those feelings, to be sure, and I can only offer a sample size of 1, but I just wanted to note that the player behavior you're looking at is susceptible to multiple interpretations. After all, sometimes you might like your players to quit playing while they're happy so they can tell all their friends to buy DD, as opposed to sitting at the computer getting more and more irritated.